About the authors

“Nor do we believe that any amount of author reputation is (or should be) able to prop up a bad piece. We credit our readers with the requisite intelligence and skepticism to do their own fact checking and assign their own credibility ratings to our content.”

The authors of the FM website

The FM website has no party line, no one voice. Everybody speaks their own mind, and their words do not represent the views of other contributors.

(1) Chet Richards (Colonel, USAF, retired), former Editor

Ph.D. Mathematics. Colonel, USAF, retired. Long-time editor of the original Defense and the National Interest website (archived here — NO relationship to the site now at that address!), and blogs at Fast Transients. He is Adjunct Professor of Strategy and Quantitative Methods at Kennesaw St. University in Atlanta, and author of

Alth0ugh he played a decisive role in the creation and early days of the FM website, and still provides valuable guidance, he assumes no responsibility for the material on this website.

(2) Joe Bonham (pseudonym)

Joe completed 5 years in the US Marine Corps, including two tours in Afghanistan. He is now a Staff Sergeant in the National Guard, with one tour in Kuwait.

In Dalton Trumbo’s 1938 novel Johnny Got His Gun, Joe Bonham was a young soldier serving in World War I, who awoke in a hospital bed after being caught in the blast of an artillery shell. He gradually realizes that he has lost his arms, legs, and face, but that his mind functions perfectly, leaving him a prisoner in his own body, and embarks on a struggle to communicate, and to retain his own sanity.

(3) H. Thomas Hayden (Lt. Colonel, USMC, retired)

He retired after 35 years of service, which included the Agency for International Development, the Marine Corps, defense industry and the Pentagon. His specialties are Intelligence, Counterinsurgency Operations, Anti/Counter-terrorism, and Joint Concepts Development and Experimentation.

His Marine Corps assignments included command of two separate battalions; AC/S G-2, 4th MARDIV & AC/S G-2 FMFEurope; Branch Head, HQMC, Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC); Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for SO/LIC; and, Senior Program Analysts at HQMC with the Joint Staff and DoD at the Pentagon. Overseas combat assignments included Vietnam, Central America, Gulf War, Somalia and and Colombia.

He has a MBA (Pepperdine Univ) and an MA in International Relations (Univ of Southern California).

He has written two books and is working on a third.

Hayden’s other publications:

Warfighting: Maneuver Warfare in the US Marine Corps (1995)

Shadow War: Special Operations and Low Intensive Conflict (1991)

Contributor to Amphibious Assault: Manoeuver from the Sea, Royal Navy and Royal Marine (2005)

“Counterinsurgency in Iraq started with Fallujah”, Marine Corps Gazette, October 2007

(4) Don Vandergriff (Major, US Army, retired)

He retired in 2005 at the rank of Major after 24 years of active duty as an enlisted Marine and Army officer. He now works as a consultant to the municipalities, corporations, and the US Army. See this page for a list of his books and other publications.

(5) G.I. Wilson (Colonel, USMC, retired)

He retired from the Marine Corps after 30+ years of military service, including several combat tours. Today he teaches for the Administration of Justice Department of Palomar College (San Marcos, CA). Also, he has consulted for ABC-7 Los Angeles, Knowledge and Intelligence Program Professionals KIPP), and the Emergency Response Research Institute (ERRI). His posts on the FM website are listed here.

Education

BA in psychology from the State University of New York at Albany

MA in Business and Organizational Security Management from Webster University

“Careerism and Psychopathy in the US Military”, a chapter in The Pentagon Labyrinth: Ten Short Essays to Help You Through It, edited by Winslow T. Wheeler and published by the Center for Defense Information and the World Security Institute (2011).

(6) Marcus J. Ranum

He is a world-renowned expert on security system design and implementation. He is recognized as an early innovator in firewall technology, and the implementor of the first commercial firewall product. Since the late 1980′s, he has designed a number of groundbreaking security products including the DEC SEAL, the TIS firewall toolkit, the Gauntlet firewall, and NFR’s Network Flight Recorder intrusion detection system.

He has been involved in every level of operations of a security product business, from developer, to founder and CEO of NFR. Marcus has served as a consultant to many FORTUNE 500 firms and national governments, as well as serving as a guest lecturer and instructor at numerous high-tech conferences. In 2001, he was awarded the TISC “Clue” award for service to the security community, and the ISSA Lifetime Achievement Award. Marcus is Chief Of Security for Tenable Security, Inc., where he is responsible for research in open source logging tools, and product training. He serves as a technology advisor to a number of start-ups, established concerns, and venture capital groups.

(7) Larry Kummer, Editor

The current editor of the FM website is Larry Kummer. He has 37 years experience in the finance industry in a variety of roles. From 1994 to October 2013 he was at USB, for the last 15 years a senior portfolio manager and Vice President of Investments.

He was a Boy Scout leader for 15 years, concluding as Director and VP-Finance of the Mt Diablo-Silverado Council. For 20 years he was an active Republican, working on many campaigns — until the party abandoned its traditional principles.

He began writing about geopolitics in 2003 at the Defense and the National Interest website. The DNI staff set up the FM website when DNI closed down in 2007.

(8) Who was Fabius Maximus?

Fabius Maximus (280 – 203 BC) saved Rome from Hannibal by recognizing Rome’s weakness and the need to conserve its strength. He turned from the easy path of boldness to the long, difficult trek of rebuilding Rome’s power and greatness. His life holds profound lessons for 21st Century Americans.